CIA Director Smears Wikileaks After Tweeting Them During 2016 Election

CIA Director Smears Wikileaks After Tweeting Them During 2016 Election

CIA Director Mike Pompeo blasted Wikileaks during an event held by the Center for Strategic & International Studies today, despite having promoted the publisher’s leaks in 2016 to attack political opponents during the U.S. Presidential elections.

Pompeo took an extremely hard line with the publishing giant, labelling them a “non-state hostile intelligence service” before repeating the baseless contention that Wikileaks was abetted by the Russian Federation, despite FBI Director James Comey’s assertion in late March that Wikileaks has never dealt directly with the Russian government.

Pompeo further stated that the Russian media outlet Russia Today (RT) had actively collaborated with Wikileaks, and that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was a narcissist and a fraud “hiding behind a computer screen.” Mr. Assange is currently residing in Ecuador’s London Embassy, where he has been held in de-facto captivity since August 2012 after being granted asylum by Ecuador. On April 6, 2016 the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found that Assange’s detention was unlawful. They ordered that he be released immediately and compensated by Sweden and the United Kingdom for the roles these states played in his captivity.

Director Pompeo’s comments are ironic given that during the 2016 election, he was happy to publicize Wikileaks’ release of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails which proved that the DNC had been committing election fraud during the Democratic primary race and improperly communicating with members of the American media. Pompeo tweeted about about the release and accused then President Barack Obama of being complicit in the primary fraud and collusion with the press.

Wikileaks highlighting a tweet from Mike Pompeo during the he was serving as a United States Representative promoting Wikileaks releases

The apparent policy flip by Pompeo comes after Wikileaks began to release their Vault 7 series of leaks, showing that the CIA has been improperly accessing the personal electronic devices of Americans, was concealing known exploits from product manufacturers, utilizes false attribution techniques allowing them to conceal their hacking attacks by portraying them as coming from another country and uses tools which appear to have been developed by Russian criminal organizations.